What Manner of Man was Shakespeare?

The first in a four-part lecture series; 'What Was Shakespeare Really Like'

In this section

Alongside many museums, heritage and cultural organisations we face significant financial pressures while our doors remain closed to visitors. As an independent charity which generates 98% of its own income, those pressures are especially keen. Please support us if you possibly can. We are very grateful for every donation, large or small.

Transcript

Russell Jackson, Professor Emeritus of Drama, University of
Birmingham:

The first of Stanley’s lectures addresses that intriguing
question: what manner of man was he?

In the course of his career, Prof Sir Stanley Wells has
achieved what the current culture of higher education likes to term impact, on
three levels, local, national and international. Through his work with the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the University of
Birmingham Shakespeare Institute, he has supported these Stratford based
institutions in their respective and complementary missions to enrich the lives
of scholars, theatre goers, and the wider public across the globe.

In introducing the first of these lectures I want you to
think local, and imagine that you are in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s
Queen Elizabeth Hall in Henley Street, next to the Birthplace itself – the
spacious modern lecture hall now enlarged immeasurably by the technology which
is helping us, to put it mildly, through these troubled times.

I will say a few words about Sir Stanley’s work in one of
these institutions, the Shakespeare Institute.
At the risk of seeming to divert attention towards myself, I will
mention two of the personal debts I owe him.
The first is his recommendation in 1970 that I should be taken on as
student at the Institute, where he was an exemplary supervisor for my research
on the stage history of Shakespeare’s plays.
And the second is the very good turn he did me by leaving the Institute
in 1978, creating the opening for a new appointment which I was fortunate
enough to gain. Of course, in the event
it was only a temporary departure, and he returned as director of the Institute
in 1988, having overseen the Oxford edition of the complete works in the
interim. Again, on a personal level,
this gave me the opportunity to work under his guidance, this time as a
colleague.

He did much to enhance the collegiate spirit of the Institute,
the spirit that extended across the world through its alumni and through the
biennial International Shakespeare Conference.
In the Institute, and as the director of the RSC’s annual summer schools
he continued the tradition established in the late 1940s by the Institute’s
founder Allerdyce Nicoll, and Sir Barry Jackson, then artistic director of the
theatre, bringing together, to coin a well-worn phrase, stage and page. These achievements, which one might call
institutional, were a vital element of Sir Stanley’s contribution to that
worldwide collaborative activity, working with Shakespeare. Shakespeare here being a phenomenon
encompassing everything associated with the local hero, not just the plays and
poems. Through his critical and scholarly
works, literally voluminous, he has illuminated important aspects of that
general conversation around them that is a sustaining and enlightening factor
in our artistic and intellectual lives.

And now over to the man himself, to tell us what the man
Shakespeare was really like.

Professor Sir Stanley Wells:

In these talks, ladies and gentlemen, I want to think about
four specific aspects of Shakespeare’s life and work. Today I shall speak about
the general problem of discerning the personality of a writer who spent a
lifetime of creative activity in depicting people other than himself. In my
second talk I shall address the question of how Shakespeare set about the task
of writing a play. Thirdly, I shall ask what we can deduce about his
personality from the body of work in which he seems to write most directly
about himself, his sonnets. And finally I shall ask what made him laugh.

First, then, how can we hope to know what he was like? It’s
a question that characters in the plays ask about other characters. When a
nobleman intrudes upon the revels in the Boar’s Head Tavern (1 Henry IV, 2.
5.295), Sir John Falstaff asks ‘What manner of man is he?’ In the same scene [lines
422-3] Prince Hal asks Falstaff, who is standing in for King Henry, ‘What
manner of man, an it like your majesty?’.

A
narrative account of the bare facts of a person’s journey through life, their
parentage and education, their career, the ‘actions that a man might play’ do
not, as Hamlet knows, pluck out the heart of his mystery. A curriculum vitae or
a Who’s Who entry may supply such an account. What people show to the world
around them may reveal little or nothing of their inner being, just as the
visible signs of Hamlet’s mourning for Claudius are ‘but the trappings and the
suits of woe.’

Biographical studies of Shakespeare vary in the degree to
which they attempt to dig below the surface to interpret the facts of his life
in search of the inner man. Some accounts are pretty well wholly objective. I
think for example of E. K. Chambers’s William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and
Problems, and of S. Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, and its
lesser-known sequel, Records and Images, which offer raw materials for the
biography that Schoenbaum hoped to write but did not live long enough to
do. At the other extreme is Katherine
Duncan-Jones’s Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. It’s a combative title. She is
picking up on the fact that several of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including
Ben Jonson, referred to him as ‘gentle’ (which of course could refer to social
status no less than to character). In her view, the adjective as applied to his
character is undeserved. Making interpretative use of absence of evidence she
remarks in the blurb of her book that ‘unlike other local worthies, or his
actor-contemporary Edward Alleyn’, Shakespeare ‘shows no inclination to divert
any of his wealth towards charitable, neighbourly or altruistic ends’. This is
not really fair, since he left £10 – half the schoolmaster’s annual salary - to
the poor of Stratford, and there are also bequests to neighbours and to other
persons outside the immediate family circle.

There have also been attempts – less fashionable now than
previously - to apply the techniques of psychoanalysis to Shakespeare through
interpretation of both the life-records and the works. An example is the volume
entitled Shakespeare’s Personality (1989), edited by Norman N. Holland and
other scholars, which offers a series of essays, many of them based on Freudian
psychology, relating Shakespeare’s life to his works. Its index includes
entries for such subjects as Shakespeare’s ‘abhorrence of vagina’, his
‘compliant tendencies’, his ‘erotic versus aggressive drives’, his ‘phallic
fantasy’, his ‘sexual fantasies’, and his ‘vindictive impulses’.

For all its intellectual sophistication, such work has to
negotiate two difficult obstacles. One is our imperfect knowledge of the facts
of Shakespeare’s life. For instance, several of the contributors to Holland’s
volume make much of what the editor refers to in his introduction as Shakespeare’s
‘father’s loss of patriarchal authority as a result of his financial decline’ (Holland,
p. 7). But that supposed financial decline is imperfectly documented and has
indeed been disputed in a study by David Fallow. John Shakespeare was buried in
September 1601; William, who already owned New Place, was his eldest son and
clearly inherited John’s house here in Henley Street; only nine months later
William made the most expensive purchase of his life, paying £320 for a large
area of land in Old Stratford. I should be surprised if all this money came
from his theatrical earnings. If his father’s supposed financial decline didn’t
occur, theories of its supposed psychological effect on Shakespeare are invalidated.

The second major obstacle to reading Shakespeare’s life
through his plays is the fact that the plays are not purely the product of his
own imagination but draw heavily both for their plots and their language on
historical events and on writings by other people, and so cannot be properly
thought of as purely the projections of his subconscious mind or as reflections
of his personal experience. To give an example close to home – in more than one
sense – there is a speech in Henry IV Part Two (act one, scene three) written
about the time that Shakespeare was buying and, there is reason to believe,
renovating New Place in which it is tempting to suppose that he was drawing on
recent personal experience:

When we mean to buildWe first survey the plot, then draw the model;And when we see the figure of the house,Then must we rate the cost of the erection,Which if we find outweighs ability,What do we then but draw anew the modelIn fewer offices, or, at least, desistTo build at all?

The temptation may dwindle, however, when we find that the
lines paraphrase quite closely the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders in
St. Luke’s Gospel.

Are there – in spite of the many notorious gaps in our
knowledge about Shakespeare’s life, the paucity of personal documentation, the
absence of self-revelatory letters such as we have for Keats, of diaries such
as those of Simon Forman and Samuel Pepys or, closer to our time, Virginia
Woolf, intimate memoirs such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte
and documentary films such as we have for some more recent writers – are there,
in spite of such absences, ways in which we can attempt to pluck out the heart
of Shakespeare’s mystery?

To start with, these absences are not total. We have expressions
of opinion about him from contemporaries. These start in 1592, when he was 28,
with the description of him in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit as an ‘upstart
crow’. This is an obviously malicious and envious gibe, and it was countered by
the prolific but congenitally impecunious writer Henry Chettle in his Kind
Heart’s Dream: ‘I am as sory,’ wrote Chettle, ‘as if the originall fault had
beene my fault because myselfe have seene his [i.e. Shakespeare's] demeanour no
lesse civill than he [is] exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides divers
of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty,
and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.’ (This is the first
time the word ‘facetious’, from the Latin meaning ‘witty’, appears in English;
here the phrase ‘facetious grace’ seems to mean something like ‘amusing
skill’.) It would be good to know who the ‘divers of worship’ were. Might they
include the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare was to dedicate Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in the two following years? Anyhow this is a
powerful character reference; and to the best of my belief, the ‘upstart crow’
jibe is the only denigratory surviving reference to Shakespeare’s character
made by any of his contemporaries throughout his career.

People liked him. The minor poet John Weever addressed him
as ‘Honey-tongued Shakespeare’ in a poem published in 1599. And he is mentioned
favourably in several commendatory poems and in the three Parnassus plays
performed at St John ’s College, Cambridge around the turn of the century – ‘O sweet Master Shakespeare, I’ll have his
picture in my study at the court’’, says Gullio. Heminges and Condell, in their
dedication to the Folio, also write of his personality. He was their ‘worthy
friend and fellow whose reputation they wish to keep alive.’ And in their
preface addressed to ‘the great variety of readers’, they write of him as a
‘gentle expresser of nature’. Of course
they are not writing on oath, but the amount of effort that Heminges and
Condell, actors by profession and amateurs in the art of editing, put into
compiling the volume is itself a testimony to their affection for the man who
left money for them – along with Richard Burbage, who had died before the Folio
went to press - to buy mourning rings.

There are predictably laudatory posthumous comments and
tributes in the First Folio including Ben Jonson’s great elegy headed ‘To the
memory of my beloved the author Mr William Shakespeare and what he hath left
us. This is more concerned with Shakespeare’s artistry and his fame than with
his personality, but the famously outspoken Jonson does refer to Shakespeare as
his ‘beloved’, says that the ‘race / Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly
shines / In his well-turnèd and true-filèd lines’, and calls him ‘Sweet’ - that
word again – ‘swan of Avon.’

Ben Jonson also gives us the most intimate surviving
testaments to Shakespeare’s character in his notebooks published posthumously
as Timber: or Discourses upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his
daily readings or had their reflux from his peculiar notion of the times.’ These give us what must surely be the most
honest and fullest assessment of Shakespeare’s character deriving from a
contemporary. Jonson says:

I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side
idolatry as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free
nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions,
wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should
be stopped. His wit was in his own power: would the rule of it had been so
too. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him
to be praised than to be pardoned. (‘Vices’ here surely refers to stylistic
faults rather than to moral qualities.

In spite of the
cautious qualification in ‘this side idolatry’, the view that Shakespeare was
‘honest, and of an open and free nature’ represents a noble and generous
character reference from a writer who had once been a rival.

To the
somewhat generalized tributes to Shakespeare’s character – his ‘uprightness of
dealing’ - we can his capacity to keep out of trouble with the law. Most of his
fellow playwrights, unlike him, spent time in prison for a variety of offences
– Marlowe for, among other crimes, suspected murder; Jonson for killing a man
in a duel; Dekker on numerous occasions for debt. Shakespeare seems to have had
two brushes with the law. In 1596 in which one William Waite served on him and
on several other theatre people a writ requiring them to keep the peace ‘for
fear of death and mutilation of limbs’; according to Schoenbaum this is ‘a
conventional legal phrase in such documents.’ In other words, Shakespeare was
part of an overly boisterous night-out with the theatrical friends. We should
like to know more about it. The second (which includes a third) brush with the
law names him as having defaulted on tax payments in both September 1597 and
October 1598. There are no records of prosecutions. Shakespeare on those two occasions
was probably simply living away from Bishopsgate – in Stratford-upon-Avon,
moving into New Place, and overseeing its renovations. Shakespeare’s only known
brush with the law of a kind at all similar These instances apart, Shakespeare
appears to have been exceptionally law-abiding.

What about Shakespeare’s outward appearance? We have
evidence of varying degrees of reliability about what Shakespeare looked like.
Most reliable, I suppose, are the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio,
certified as a true likeness by Ben Jonson in verses printed below it, and the
bust in Holy Trinity Church, presumably approved by members of his family.
There are also the Chandos and Cobbe portraits, both with claims of good provenance.
The (late) report by John Aubrey mentions that he was ‘a handsome, well-shaped
man’. Some contemporary writers had distinctive features. Thomas Nashe
described Robert Greene’s hair as ‘A jolly long red peak – like the spire of a
steeple ‘ which ‘he cherished continually without cutting, whereat a man might
hang a jewel, is was so sharp and pendant.’ Nashe himself was famous for his
unruly shock of hair and his beardlessness – unusual at the time. And Ben
Jonson was exceptionally large – he is said to have weighed over twenty stone
at one stage of his life. Everything suggests, on the other hand, that there
was nothing especially striking about Shakespeare’s appearance. His appearance
was conventional, middle class - we might even say, respectable. He went to the
barber’s regularly, both in Stratford and in London, to have his hair cut and
his beard neatly trimmed.

Various other potentially revealing areas of investigation
exist. It is possible, for example, to assess his attitudes to work. We may
deduce something about his ambition, his conscientiousness, his industry, by
looking at the tasks he undertook. Early in his career he wrote the two long
narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1593 and
1594 respectively. Maybe this is because he saw the need for an alternative
career while the theatres were closed because of plague. In his early years, at
least, he worked as an actor – the 1616
Folio of his rival Ben Jonson’s plays names him in the actor list of Every Man
in his Humour, played at the Curtain in 1598, and as one of the ‘principal
tragedians’ in Jonson’s Sejanus in 1603, and he heads the list of actors in the
1623 First Folio of his own plays, but ‘Less for making’ is scribbled beside
his name in a copy in the Glasgow University Library, which may suggest that as
time passed his colleagues gave him time off from his acting duties so that he
could write. He worked too as a theatre administrator, helping for two decades
to manage a single theatre company, which suggests a high degree of business
acumen, of stability of character, and of conscientiousness. Above all he
worked as a playwright, producing an average of around two plays a year over
two decades or more, but ceasing it would seem around 1613, three years before
he died. And, as I shall discuss later, much serious reading lies behind his
writings. He was a hard-working man for
most of his life.

We may learn more about him too by thinking about how he got
on with his colleagues, observing for instance that they stuck together over
long periods of time and that he both received and made bequests to some of
them. He was a true company man, writing with individual actors in mind for
specific roles. He knew his colleagues’ strengths and their limitations. As his leading actor and co-founder of the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Richard Burbage, grew older Shakespeare provided for
him star roles that did not require him to appear youthful. It would be
interesting to know how long Burbage went on playing Romeo and Hamlet;
certainly the central characters in plays written later in the careers of the
playwright and his leading actor are less youthful than in the earlier plays. And
it is clear from the first printed text of Much Ado About Nothing that he had
Will Kemp and Abraham Cowley in mind for the roles of Dogberry and Verges.

We can learn about Shakespeare too by thinking about his
financial affairs, his purchases and his investments – how extensive they were,
where they were, and when and to what end he made them. It is surely
significant that he appears to have lived relatively modestly in more than one
neighbourhood in London and to have poured most of his financial resources into
property and land in his home town. From the age of 33 – only three years after
the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – he owned New Place, the largest
house in the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon.
Five years after this, in 1602, he paid £320 for the Welcombe estate, a
property of some 107 acres – almost as big at the whole of the Borough of
Stratford-upon-Avon (109 acres). And
only three years later, in 1605, he paid £440 for a share in the Stratford
tithes. His last known investment, and his only known purchase of property in
London, came in March 1613 when he along with three associates agreed to pay
£140 for the lease of the Blackfriars Gatehouse, which was close to the
Blackfriars playhouse. Such information
may help us to assess where his priorities lay, how much he cared about his family
and about his social status. We can think, too, about his family concerns. We
can examine his will, thinking about what it reveals about his standing in the
local community at the time of his death, what it suggests about his attitudes
to his surviving relatives and friends, to his fellow Stratfordians and to his
colleagues. In so doing, we should bear in mind that wills were as they always
have been – starkly legal documents. The phrase ‘second-best bed’, so often
interpreted as personally inflected, was matter-of-fact and ensured that his
widow, Anne, had residential rights in New Place.

Even without the aid of psychoanalytical techniques we can
assess much from Shakespeare’s writings about his mental qualities. We can say
confidently that he was highly articulate, at least on the page; that he had a
wide, flexible vocabulary which developed over the years. We can observe that
the Latin that he learnt at school lies on the surface in his earlier writings
but goes underground later. We can examine his vocabulary to see what it can
tell us about his areas of knowledge such as the law, the court and the
countryside, hunting, shooting and fishing, his familiarity with dialects and
with languages other than English, and with various kinds of technical
language. We can see how he deployed his vocabulary in his writings, his
awareness of rhetorical devices and the development of his skill in using them,
his innovative powers. We can observe, for example, that he uses highly
specialized language of horse breeding in a speech by Biondello in The Taming
of the Shrew, and that a speech in Much Ado About Nothing shows remarkable
familiarity with women’s clothing – the Duchess of Milan’s wedding gown was
made of ‘cloth o’ gold, and cuts, and laced with silver, set with pearls, down
sleeves, side sleeves, and skirts, round underborne with a bluish tinsel’ – and
we may wonder where he got all this from. He clearly had an exceptional sense
of verbal rhythm, an ear for the musical qualities of language, and a capacity
to tussle with complex ideas. And of course we know that he was capable of
extreme sexual wordplay, used sometimes to scintillatingly comic ends but also
in profound explorations of sexual torment and disgust in plays such as Timon
of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, and in the Sonnets.

We have no record of his exercising his verbal skills in
private life. Indeed the records of what he actually said are sparse. There is
one juicy episode, reported in the diary of Henry Manningham, a lawyer at the Middle
Temple, who saw Twelfth Night performed there on 2 February 1602. A few weeks
later, on 13 March, Manningham wrote ‘Upon a time when Burbage played Richard
III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went
from the play she appointed him to come to her that night by the name of
Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was
entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. The message being brought that
Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William
the Conqueror was before Richard.’ It is a good story, worthy of theatrical
circles, and it may be true. It is funny but of course it has serious
implications in its presentation of a promiscuously adulterous Shakespeare. The
only other contemporary record of what Shakespeare is reported of having said
is when he said very little – in the witness box in the Bellott-Mountjoy case
in the spring of 1612. The sparse records of conversations and correspondence
with his Stratford friends about the controversial Welcombe enclosures tell us
little, though Duncan-Jones may be right in discerning a significant, even
hypocritical division between the man who can make King Lear pray for ‘poor
homeless wretches’ and the landowner who, a few years after writing that, seems
more concerned about his financial security than about the interests of the
poor people of his native town. People don’t always practise what they preach,
and Shakespeare was clearly interested in securing what was best for his own
family.

We can deduce much from Shakespeare’s writings about his
education, and we can relate this to what is known of the curriculum of the
school that was available to him, sometimes, especially in his early plays,
quoting directly from works of classical literature in the original language
(for example, in Titus Andronicus). We know a lot about the amount of reading
he had to do for some, at least, of his plays. We can assess his knowledge of
the Bible, and we may try to deduce which parts of it he found most to his
taste. We can even deduce what he was reading at certain times: the Book of
Revelation, for example, while he was composing Antony and Cleopatra. We can
argue about whether his writings betray his religious leanings – was he a
Protestant, did he have Roman Catholic sympathies, how did he feel both
personally and professionally about Puritanism? – if I had to express my own
views I should say that he was a conforming Church of England Protestant, did
not have Roman Catholic sympathies, and profoundly disliked the Puritans.

We can see that he went on reading assiduously and widely
throughout his working life, and we may make deductions from this about his
sociability – aided perhaps by Aubrey’s remark that he ‘was not a company
keeper; lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be debauched, and, if invited to writ he
was in pain.’ He needed time to himself. We can see that he had a taste for –
or at least that he saw that he could make use in his own work of - certain
sorts of literature – the poetry of his contemporaries and predecessors such as
Geoffrey Chaucer, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Philip Sidney, works of English
and classical history, Italianate romance, popular English fiction by writers including Greene and
Lodge, philosophical writings including the essays of Montaigne, studies of
contemporary issues such as A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures by
Samuel Harsnett – who became Archbishop of York - and we can be certain from
the date of publication of some of these books that he remained an assiduous
reader for most, at least, of his life. We may note absences from the record,
too, such as the small impact on his work of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Still developing studies in authorship and dramatic
collaboration suggest that in his earlier years Shakespeare was enough of a
team player to collaborate with George Peele (on Titus Andronicus), and
possibly with Nashe and Marlowe. From the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men in1594 onwards we can see him continuing to plough his own furrow as an
essentially romantic dramatist in face of the growing popularity of city
comedy, led by Ben Jonson, and of satirical tragedy in the works of writers
such as John Marston and Thomas Middleton, even though in his later years he
found enough sympathy with Middleton to collaborate with him and to draw on his
individual talents for the more satirical scenes of Timon of Athens; and we can
perhaps more readily understand how he found a congenial collaborator in the
more romantically inclined John Fletcher, a younger man who may have seen
Shakespeare as a mentor. At the same time we may wonder how he got on in his
collaboration on Pericles with the villainous George Wilkins, brothel keeper
and woman beater; indeed our knowledge that he worked with him may extend our
sense of his powers of (moral) tolerance.

Through study of texts on which Shakespeare collaborated
with other writers we can think about what collaboration involved. It doesn’t
for example necessarily mean that he sat down in the same room as Marlowe or
Middleton or Fletcher or Wilkins, and that they worked on both plot and
dialogue in intimate communion. Ben Jonson boasts in the Prologue to Volpone
that he wrote the play single-handed within the space of five weeks:

‘Tis known, five weeks fully penned itFrom his own hand, without a coadjutor,Novice, journeyman, or tutor.’

Here Jonson usefully identifies four different kinds of
collaborator. ‘Coadjutor’ is an ecclesiastical term referring to a bishop’s
assistant, so here I suppose we may take it to apply to a more or less equal
collaborator; ‘novice’ seems to imply a beginner or apprentice playwright,
‘journeyman’ a hack writer, and ‘tutor’ an experienced writer working alongside
and advising a novice. George Peele, with whom it is now believed Shakespeare
worked on the early Titus Andronicus, was eight years older than Shakespeare.
Was he, as it were, the tutor and Shakespeare the novice? If Shakespeare really
did collaborate with his almost exact contemporary Christopher Marlowe, were
they genuine coadjutors or was the more experienced Marlowe in charge? Or did
they perhaps devise plots together and then write their allotted scenes
independently? In Shakespeare’s later years, was he perhaps ‘tutor’ to his
collaborator Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher, both of whom were about
sixteen years younger than he?

Study of the structure of his plays can help us to identify
qualities of mind that made him successful as a plotter, as someone who could
construct a complex dramatic structure, who had a practical knowledge of the
theatrical conditions of his time, of the limitations imposed by the fact that
only male actors would appear in his plays, that he needed to lay out his plot
so that an individual actor might be required to take more than one role. We
can guess that such exigencies affected his plotting. Did Lady Montague, for instance,
die before her time because there was no one left to play her in the final
scene of Romeo and Juliet? We can
sometimes identify limitations in his dramatic technique, and developments in
it as he gained in experience. Even early in his career there is a great leap
forward between the relatively amateurish plotting of The Two Gentlemen of
Verona and the masterly construction of The Comedy of Errors.

We can see him as an observer of the life around him, as
someone who knew, whether from direct experience or through his reading, about
domestic life, about the law, and music, and philosophy, about plants and
gardens, and about hunting and wild life. We can think about his sense of
individual character, both by observing how he makes characters in his plays
speak and behave and also by observing what he makes them say about other
characters in their plays, their moral attitudes, their foibles and
sensitivities. We can look at his portrayal of human idiosyncrasy, observing
his sympathetic amusement at the ramblings of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and
of Justice Shallow, at the immature illusions of the lords in Love’s Labour’s
Lost, the affected language of Osric in Hamlet, the social pretensions of the
Old Shepherd and his son in The Winter’s Tale. We can try to assess his
sensibility by examining how in his plays he imagines himself into his
characters’ attitudes to the life around them. We can observe, for example,
that he was capable of empathizing with the suffering of animals: ‘The poor
beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great as
when a giant dies’ says Isabella in Measure for Measure (3.1.). And in Pericles
(Scene 15, or 4.1.), Marina evinces the same kind of sensibility:

Believe me, la, I never killed a mouse nor hurt a fly.I trod upon a worm
against my will,But I wept for it.

We can wonder how common such empathy was at the time – I
remember Terence Spencer saying that he had observed it only in Shakespeare and
Montaigne.

We can think about the absences in the literary as well as
the biographical record; about for instance the fact that in spite of his
massive literary talent he wrote almost entirely for the theatre, that he
appears not to have written masques for the court, or pageants for the City, or
what we may call ‘public’ poems such as commendatory verses for other writers’
work, or comments on national events, or tributes on the death of members of
the royal family such as Queen Elizabeth in 1603 or Prince Henry in 1612 – both
of which elicited extensive comment from fellow writers. We can wonder about
‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ – how did it come to be published, what are its
apparently esoteric significances, what relationship, if any, did Shakespeare
have to Sir John Salusbury – whose son, incidentally, addressed a sonnet to his
‘good friends’ Heminges and Condell on the publication of the 1623 Folio?

We can think about the implications for Shakespeare’s
personality of his choice of subject matter for his plays, of the fact that
almost all of them are set in the past and (except of course for the English
history plays) in foreign lands. And in relation to this we can consider how
his choice of subject matter compares with that of his contemporaries – of his
fondness for Italian sources, of the comparative absence from his plays of
clear topical reference, of his general avoidance of direct contemporary
satire. He was a Romantic, and his work always had a touch of the old-fashioned
about it, even whilst bristling with dazzling new words, freshly-minted from
his hyper-articulating imagination.

We can
observe his sympathetic portrayal of morally dubious characters such as
Bardolph and Doll Tearsheet, Parolles, Toby Belch, and even Falstaff, and we
can contrast this with his evident dislike of such cold fish as Prince John and
Angelo, Don John, Octavius Caesar, or Giacomo. Some characters in his plays,
such as Richard III and Iago, may seem unmitigatedly evil, but other villains,
such as Macbeth and even Edmund in King Lear, are portrayed with a degree of
sympathy and understanding, and he is unmoralistic about, for example, the
passions of Antony and Cleopatra.

We can, I think, deduce something about Shakespeare’s
personal opinions from the plays. He seems to me to have distrusted people,
like Iago in Othello, and Goneril, Regan, and above all Edmund, in King Lear,
who express a severely rationalistic view of life and of morality, and to have
sympathized more easily with the sceptical irrationality of Gloucester and indeed
of Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio …’ There is a
speech by Lafeu in All’s Well that Ends Well, unnecessary to the action, in
which I think that for once we can hear
Shakespeare speaking: ‘They say miracles are past, and we have our
philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things [that are]
supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors,
ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to
an unknown fear.’ (2.3.1-6) He is suggesting that ‘clever’, excessively
rational people, try to reduce to a commonplace level matters that are beyond
human understanding, reducing the mysteries of the universe to a series of
scientific formulae, making ‘trifles of terrors’ instead of opening their
imaginations to the fullness of experience – or, as he puts it, submitting
themselves ‘to an unknown fear’- that is, to the uncertainties of the unknown
and unknowable. It is an exact description of the error that Lady Macbeth makes
in thinking that she can ignore the promptings of imagination. Essentially, it
seems to me, this identifies Shakespeare as someone who acknowledges the
mystery of human life but is not bound by any dogma.

We can also, I suggest, discern something about the subconscious
workings of Shakespeare’s mind in images not directly demanded by the
narrative, in a manner that was adumbrated by Caroline Spurgeon in her book Shakespeare’s
Imagery and What it Tells Us and, more subtly, by Edward Armstrong in his Shakespeare's
Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration of 1943,
where he discerns recurrent image-clusters that help to track the working of
Shakespeare’s subconscious mind.

And I notice a recurrent preoccupation with imagery of
diminution, as in Edgar’s description of Dover Cliff:

The fishermen, that
walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight. (The Tragedy of King Lear, 4.5.)

It comes again elsewhere, as
in Innogen’s imagining of Posthumus’s departure:

I would have broke mine
eye-strings; cracked them, but
To look upon him, till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle,
Nay, followed him, till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air, and then
Have turned mine eye and wept . (Cymbeline, 1.3.

And maybe this preoccupation relates also to recurrent
imagery of a coming together of opposites, as several times in The Winter’s
Tale, as when Camillo says of Leontes and Polixenes:

they have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a vast, and
embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds. (1.1.)

And in the Young
Shepherd’s:

I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the
sky: betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust
a bodkin's point. (The Winter’s Tale, 3.3.)

And this observational quality is also present in Othello (2.1.):

For do but stand upon the foaming
shore,The chidden billow seems to pelt the
clouds;The wind-shaked surge, with high and
monstrous mane,Seems to cast water on the burning
bear,And quench the guards of the
ever-fixed pole.

These are just a few instances of points in the plays where
the poetic content seems to me to be determined as much by Shakespeare’s
subconscious mind as by his literary intentions.

In brief, it seems to me that Shakespeare led a life of
external respectability and that he achieved personal popularity and worldly
success, but the amazing degree of imaginative fecundity and emotional ferment
to which his works bear abundant witness surely reflects a life of inner
turmoil. His life is a tale of two cities (or one town and one city). In
Stratford he is the prosperous and outwardly respectable family man. But he
leads a double life, disappearing at frequent intervals to the metropolis.
There he is the successful poet, actor, and playwright, leading member of the
most successful theatre company of the age, a frequenter of the royal court and
also of the Inns of Court. I see him as a man whose inner tensions were
contained with stern self-discipline in an external appearance of harmony, but
who found release in the creative energy that informs his plays and especially,
I believe, in his Sonnets. In some of them, I believe, he delved deeply into
his innermost self, discovering for himself what manner of man he was by giving
voice to his most intimate being. I plan
to talk about the Sonnets in the third of my lectures, but next week I shall
remain with his professional life and discuss how he wrote his plays.

A
talk by Stanley Wells, for reference purposes only; not to be copied or
reproduced

Get involved

Useful

Follow us

Sharing Shakespeare with the World

We rely on the support of visitors, donors, Friends and volunteers to help inspire future generations through Shakespeare's works, life and times.

The independent charity that cares for the world’s greatest Shakespeare heritage sites in Stratford-upon-Avon, and promotes the enjoyment and understanding of his works, life and times all over the world. Celebrating Shakespeare is at the heart of everything we do.